UCD's Academic Advising System
e2s Academic Advising System
For the pilot, UCD will be using two systems. One is in InfoHub for allocating students to academic advisors, and the second is e2s (engage2serve) which students and academic advisors will use to support the academic advising process. The e2s Academic Advising System is accessible via http://academicadvising.ucd.ie and is also accessible via the UCD Connect landing page.
Visit the Academic Advising Workvivo Space for up-to-date information on system developments. In order to improve the system we would like to hear suggestions and feedback from users in the pilot schools. Please use this short form to share your thoughts and let us know if there is anything we can do to improve your experience.
Information for students about the system is available on the academic advising system web page of the Academic Advising Website for students.
Features of the e2s Academic Advising System
Home
Once you log in, you will be able to see the students assigned to you. You can easily email them or perform other quick actions in bulk or you can click on a student's name to see key information imported from Banner including their profile picture, programme, major, stage and contact details. In this student information screen (called “Student 360”) you can carry out any of the actions below for the individual student.
Calendar
You can directly book in-person or Zoom appointments with a student or group of students or you can publish your availability, visible to only your students, so that they can self-serve and book a slot that suits them. The calendar is integrated with your UCD Zoom account and will automatically create a Zoom meeting. Student attendance can be recorded for group and individual meetings.
Notes
You can post a note for your student to read in the system or they can post a note for you to read in your own time. This feature enables academic advisors to keep a record of all communications with their students in one place with notes grouped together by thread. The notes are for two-way communications, whilst the email is for one-way announcement-style communication, similar to how Brightspace email works.
Student Reflection Tool (Polls/Survey)
The Reflection Tool is an interactive section which you can use to send your students a set of questions to help them reflect or make decisions. This tool is called (Polls/Survey) on the staff side. If your pilot school lead has requested any reflection questions for your school, they will already be set up for you to use.
Student Academic Plan
Students can create and work on an academic plan in this area. The plan can either be a document or it can consist of a number of objectives in the Notes area. If your pilot school lead has requested any academic plans for your school, they will already be set up for you to use.
e2s Training and Support for Academic Advisors
You will be prompted to log in with your UCD account to access these resources.
Support and Queries
For support with the UCD Academic Advising System contact academic.advising@ucd.ie
InfoHub Academic Advising Allocation System
A new InfoHub Academic Advising Allocation system has been developed to allocate students to academic advisors. Additionally, academic and administrative staff are able to see the academic advisor allocations for their schools via the Academic Advising menu on the Students tab in InfoHub. This functionality was requested by a number of the pilot schools and enables colleagues who do not have or need access to e2s to see and download lists of academic advisor allocations for their schools.
On 11th September 2024, a two-step process overseen by designated school and college administrators and centrally managed by the Academic Advising System Administrator, August Connolly, will take place:
Step one
The first step is to allocate students to schools. This is done based on the proportion of modules students take with schools. Where students are clearly taking the majority of their modules with a particular school, they are allocated to that school. Where the proportion of modules that a student is taking is equal across two or more schools, the student is allocated to the school with the lower student-academic advisor ratio. There will be a small number of students, who cannot be allocated to schools automatically for one reason or another. For example, they might not be registered to any modules. These students will be listed for each college based on the college of their major. The college administrator needs to review the list and decide if the students need to be allocated to a school and subsequently to an academic advisor.
Step two
The second step is to allocate the students to academic advisors. After schools and colleges have had a chance to review and amend the allocations to schools, a central process will be run to allocate the students to academic advisors.
Academic Advisor Allocations Sent to e2s Academic Advising System
On completion of the above steps, the list of academic advisors and their allocated students will be sent to the e2s Academic Advising System by Friday 13th September 2024. At that point, students will technically be able to log into the e2s Academic Advising System but they won't be invited to do so by pilot schools before Monday 16th September.
Late joining students
For students who join UCD late the process will be repeated. School and college administrators will be informed of the dates for allocating students registering following CAO rounds 2, 3, 4 and 5. These are now pencilled in for 17th Sept, 25th Sept, 2nd October and 9th October.
Frequently Asked Questions
As part of the Academic Advising Initiative, a piece of work took place during summer 2023 to see what existing UCD technology could be used to support academic advising. This included looking at the functionality in Brightspace. An interim solution including Brightspace was proposed to the pilot schools. The proposal was not accepted as the key requirements could not be satisfied with this approach, for example, it was not possible to allocate students to advisors and set these groups up automatically on Brightspace. There was no function to record student attendance at meetings and for schools to report on it and there was no easy way for academic advisors to track all the communications to students in one place.
e2s has been integrated with UCD systems as much as possible:
- e2s uses the UCD single sign-on and is accessible via the UCD Connect landing page.
- e2s is integrated with Zoom.
- UCD room and building information has been imported into the e2s appointment system.
- It is possible to add appointments which have been booked into your Google calendar.
- Key student information from Banner and staff information from InfoHub will be imported into e2s.
The roles, which have access to e2s are academic advisors, senior academic advisors, school administrators, college administrators and the academic advising system administrator.
Students, academic advisors, senior academic advisors and the academic advising system administrator can see the notes in the e2s system. School administrators and college administrators can not see the notes. This is in line with GDPR principles and ensures that students have transparency regarding the information recorded about them.
The requirements for the academic advising system were determined as part of the work of the Academic Advising Initiative. Phase one of the initiative included:
- A university-wide consultation process to capture the perspectives and experiences of students and faculty on academic advising
- The piloting of different approaches to academic advising across UCD schools/disciplines
- An initial exploration of how technology could be leveraged to support academic advising at scale
- Development of a working definition, objectives and principles of academic advising for UCD.
More information on this work is available in the Report of Academic Advising Working Group.
As part of phase two of the Academic Advising Initiative, a consultation with heads of schools was carried out leading to further refinement of the requirements. For more information see the Report on the Consultation with Heads of Schools.
An Academic Advising IT Steering Group including the leads from each of the pilot schools was established in November 2023 leading to a final set of system requirements for the pilot.
Consideration was given as to whether UniShare could provide the functionality to support Academic Advising, however, there were a number of gaps identified (e.g. sharing of academic plans, ability to schedule appointments) which meant that UniShare was not a viable option.
Click on the Communication Log, where you will see the emails sent. You can also access sent emails via Reports. Go to BI, "My Sent Emails," where you will see a list of emails sent by subject, date and number of individuals issued to.
Following the appointment, an option to mark attendance will appear at the bottom of the Appointment Details screen (accessed via Calendar). In Actions > Attendance, select whether the student has 'Attended' or 'Not Attended,' and add a note (this is a required step and will be visible to the student), then Submit. For further information, please see the System Guide.